Quotes

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.